TikTok says its providers are restored after the outage

In January, the U.S. finalized the deal to create a separate entity for TikTok. A U.S.-based investor consortium called TikTok USDS took a controlling 80% stake, with the remaining 20% ownership held by ByteDance.

Following the deal finalization — which coincided with the snowstorm — users experienced glitches in features like posting, searching within the app, slower load times, and time-outs. TikTok noted that creators might see zero views on their posts until the problem was resolved. Later, the company said that it was working on solving the issue, but outages persisted, and users faced problems with posting content.

TikTok’s transition to a new ownership structure, paired with app snafus and user experience glitches, was beneficial for some other social networks. The Mark Cuban-backed short video app Skylight, which is built on the AT protocol, saw its user base soar to more than 380,000 users in the week the deal was finalized. Upscrolled, a social network by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist Issam Hijazi, also climbed in App Store rankings to reach the second spot in the social media category in the U.S. The app was downloaded 41,000 times within days of the TikTok deal’s finalization, according to analyst firm AppFigures.